Fax, (short for facsimile, from Latin “fac-simile”, meaning to make similar), is a telecommunications technology used to send/receive copies of documents (facsimiles) using devices placed in communication over a network such as a telephone network or internet. The word telefax, (short for telefacsimile, meaning to make a copy at a distance), is a synonym. Although the term “fax” is not an acronym, it is often written as “FAX”. A fax device may also be referred to as a telecopier. When sending documents to people at long distances or who are remotely located, fax transmission has a distinct advantage over postal mail or courier in that the delivery of the document is nearly instantaneous. In recent times, this technology has the disadvantage of being relegated to a position beneath email as a prevailing form of document transferral.
Fax machines enable the electronic transmission and reception of facsimiles (faxes) to a recipient. Although devices for transmitting printed documents electrically have existed in various forms since the mid-20th century, modern fax machines became relatively widely available in the mid-1970s as electronic sophistication increased with expanding infrastructure and costs of technologies decreased. Over time, faxing gradually became affordable, and by the mid-1980s, fax machines were widely used in commerce. Although the technology has faced increasing competition from Internet-based document transmission systems, fax devices still retain their advantages particularly in the transmission of sensitive material which, due to legislative mandates regarding privacy such as, for instance, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), cannot be transmitted over the Internet unencrypted. In many countries, electronic signatures on faxed documents such as contracts and other agreements are recognized as binding.
Fax machines typically consist of an image scanner, a communications interface (modem), and a graphic user interface (GUI) for the interaction of the user with the fax device. An image scanner is a device that optically scans a document and converts it to a digital image. Image scanners typically use a charge-coupled device (CCD) or a contact image sensor (CIS). CCD type scanners typically contain three rows (arrays) of sensors with red, green, and blue filters. CIS scanning consists of a moving set of red, green, and blue LEDs strobed for illumination and a connected monochromatic photodiode array for light collection. The scanning bed is usually composed of a glass pane (platen) under which there is a bright light which illuminates the pane and a moving optical array in CCD scanning. A document to be scanned is placed on the platen, an opaque cover is usually lowered over the document to exclude ambient light, and the sensors and light sources move across the pane beneath the platen. An image is visible to the detector because of the light being reflected by the face of the document. Transparent images require special accessories that illuminate them from the upper side.
In operation, a user places a page of a document to be electronically transmitted onto the surface of the platen, closes the lid, enters a telephone number of a fax device into a graphical user interface (GUI), and then hits a “SCAN” or “SEND” button. The document is scanned into a digital representation and stored in memory. The fax machine then dials the telephone number of the recipient fax machine and repeatedly attempts to establish a digital communication therebetween. Once the communication between the sending machine and the receiving machine has been established, the digitized image is transmitted. Upon completion of the electronic transmission, the sending machine will print a confirmation page which then sits in a tray until retrieved by the sender.
Typically, the printed confirmation page comprises a scaled-down image of all or a portion of a first page of the faxed document. It is not uncommon for people to forget to retrieve the confirmation page as it may take many attempts by the fax machine to establish a communication with the recipient fax machine because, for example, the telephone line is busy or there are other fax jobs already queued up in the sending fax machine which precede your fax job, and the sender doesn't want to wait for the transmission to complete and the confirmation page to be printed afterward. Often, users scan the document they wish to fax, hit the SEND button, remove the document from the fax machine and walk away. At a later time, their fax job has completed and the confirmation page printed. The first page or a portion of the first page of their fax job is reprinted on the confirmation sheet. If the first page of their fax job contains personal information or other sensitive confidential subject matter such as, for example, their social security number, home address and phone, credit card information, or the like, then this information may end up on the printed confirmation page which remains in the output tray of the printer until it is retrieved by the sender. During this time, the sender's information is exposed to others who might make use of the same fax machine. Others may read the personal information printed on the confirmation page. Although some fax machines enable a sender to turn off the printing of a confirmation sheet, often a copy of the confirmation is required by the sender as a visual confirmation that their document was sent and received. The sender may require the printed confirmation page for their records.
Accordingly, what is needed in this art are methods for protecting information displayed on a fax confirmation page while still providing the sender with a visual confirmation that their document had been sent and received.